International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

Since →  Radio broadcasting was launched shortly after World War I, it has served two culturally different, almost paradoxical, functions in relation to its distribution. On the one hand, it turned out to be one of the more effective instruments in the nation-building process, and on the other it was from its initial years distributed on a global scale. Benedict Anderson's concept of “imagined communities” would express the role of radio broadcasting not as a tool for national identity-shaping within a nationalist ideology, but more as a way to encircle a common feeling or a sense of “Englishness,” “Danishness,” etc. Although in public debate about the cultural role of the electronic media it is often claimed they dilute national culture, in a historical perspective it is clearly the other way round. Over the past century, radio in large part shaped a national sense of shared imaginations and frames of reference, and at the same time also maintained its position as an international medium. During the 1930s radio was perceived as one of the most powerful media to influence →  public opinion . The Nazis described it as “the most modern, the strongest and the most revolutionary weapon which we possess in the battle against an extinct world” ( Hendy 2000 , 21). American, British, and other European broadcasters – public, state, and private – shared the assessment of radio as an instrument ... log in or subscribe to read full text